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Chapter 1: What is effective altruism and why is it important?
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Chapter 2: How did Peter Singer become involved in effective giving?
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And before you acquire or apply for a financial product, please read the PDS or product disclosure statement, which should be available on the issuer's website. Lastly, please keep in mind that past performance is not indicative of future performance. Kate, I feel like each fortnight we get a chance to sit down with someone that is kind of extraordinary in their own way.
And today, I feel like that would be an understatement. We have someone with us who is doing things that, I mean, you just have to stand back and admire from a distance. And sometimes, like now, you get up close and personal and you can actually ask some questions of your own. So... Kate, I might do the intro for this one. We're chatting to Peter Singer.
And if I just do a very short intro to Peter, it won't do him justice. But just some of the notes that we've got here is Peter is one of the world's leading moral philosophers.
Chapter 3: What role do individuals play in supporting global poverty reduction?
He's a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He's the author and co-founder of a book and a website that you can go and visit now, The Life You Can Save. It's an organization that inspires and empowers people to take action in the fight against extreme poverty. Peter, on behalf of Kate and I, it's our pleasure to have you with us.
Thank you very much, Owen, for that generous introduction, and I'm happy to be with you and with Kate.
maybe peter what we can do to start off with is maybe just i guess this is we're going to try and fit this into a very concise answer but maybe you can just give us a bit of your backstory and how you came to be involved in such an important topic oh well uh i don't know where the story begins exactly but i suppose it really begins with the decision to go into philosophy uh i originally
studied to do law and the arts was kind of a little side issue to make the law degree a little bit more interesting, but I ended up then getting a scholarship to go to Oxford and study philosophy there. And I was always interested in the areas of philosophy that made a difference to your life. So clearly that was gonna be ethics and perhaps political philosophy.
And even when I was, well, when I was just a student or still at Oxford, I started thinking about the obligations of people who, like myself, were living a comfortable material life in an affluent country as in regard to people who were in extreme poverty and extreme need.
And it was the crisis in what's now Bangladesh that arose in 1971 that made me write my first piece about this because there were nine million refugees from what was then East Pakistan who flooded into into India and India needed help to feed them. And so I was asking myself, you know, well, what ought I to be doing?
Here are 9 million people who, you know, may not get fed enough, may not have sanitation, and what are my obligations to help them? And that article got me going on the topic. Well, it's not the only topic I've been writing about, of course, but it's one of the main themes of my work since then.
I've heard you be described as one of the most influential living philosophers, which is quite the title, and hence my humbling that you are joining us here today. Obviously, you spent a lot of time earlier in your career working on improving, I guess, the ethics in how we treat animals. And now, I guess, that would be an entirely different topic for another day.
But I would encourage all of our listeners, and we'll provide links in the show notes too, to go and look at Peter's bio on the Life You Can Save Australia. We'll put a link in the show notes to that. But today, we're talking more about altruism and effective altruism and how people can give back.
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Chapter 4: How can we determine the most effective charities to support?
does provide for basic needs for people who otherwise are struggling and i'm not in any way belittling the state of poverty that exists in australia and i think we should do more about it but people in australia can take such a lot of things for granted that people in other countries can't things like clean water for instance being able to for their children to go to school but also
healthcare, you don't have to have money to get decent healthcare in Australia, and getting enough to eat, basics like that. Whereas in many parts of the world, there are people in extreme poverty, as defined by the World Bank, that's living, roughly speaking, on less than $2 a day, who can't take those things for granted.
And so, obviously, money goes further if you're using it to help people in much greater need for whom $2 a day is their total income. So $1,000 is more than they're going to earn in a year. Whereas $1,000 for an Australian, you know, an Australian in poverty might be useful, but it's not going to be life changing. So I think we need to look for those organizations.
And also among those organizations, because there are quite a few of them, we need to look for the ones that have been independently assessed and verified as giving really great value for every dollar that they receive. So I think that's the best way. Obviously, that's the way that most people can make use of. Clearly, there are other things you can do.
You can use your time and skills rather than money in order to support those organisations if you have time and skills. But for most people going about their daily lives, making significant donations, giving a reasonable proportion of your income to helping people in extreme poverty, I think is the best thing you can do.
Peter, I've got two questions on this. I guess the first one is related to the second. How much does it take to save a life? I don't know if it's crude for me to ask that question, but I've heard it asked before. And that's kind of my first question. And then the second one is,
you know, how can we, as people that are sitting at home listening to this, people that earn a salary, how can we think about how much we should give on that basis?
Right. Well, I think the question, how much does it cost to save a life, is not at all, you know, too crude a question. I think those are the sorts of questions we ought to be asking when we're comparing different organisations. Can this organisation, well, different organisations that are trying to save lives, of course, there are some organisations that might be doing things like
restoring sight in people who have cataracts or preventing people going blind. That's a different comparison, but let's just focus on organizations that are doing things like saving lives. One example of this would be the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes bed nets in malaria prone regions.
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Chapter 5: What is the cost of saving a life through donations?
And it can be pretty clearly shown that when families and particularly children sleep under bed nets, they are less likely to die from malaria, less likely to get malaria, obviously, and some of those who get malaria then die. So you can ask yourself, how much does a bed net cost? And the answer to that is very little, $2 or something.
But that's not the cost of saving a life because you have to distribute the bed net, you have to educate the families on how to use it. Plus, obviously, not every bed net is going to save a life. You have to distribute a lot of bed nets to have confidence that statistically you will have saved a life.
So an organisation called GiveWell has assessed this and it's come up with a figure of around US$3,000 to save a life by distributing bed nets, which is a long way from US$2. But on the other hand, it's also a long way under what affluent countries, including Australia, spend to save a life of somebody who is seriously ill and perhaps has to go into intensive care where you might easily spend
a thousand dollars or more per day that a person is intensive care. So, so it is very cheap by, by, uh, affluent world standards to, to save a life for that. And I thought that's the second question. So how much should people give, um, in, uh, in the book, the life you can save, which, uh, anybody can download for free from the life you can save.org or.org.au. Um,
I have a table at the back, kind of appendix, which is a bit like tax tables in that I'm suggesting a percentage that you give that increases as your income increases. Because as your income increases, obviously, you can afford to give a higher percentage of that income. So I start out with just 1% for people earning around $40,000.
And I go up to giving away a third of your income for people who are you know, seriously wealthy, earning, let's say, a million dollars or something. And of course, you know, one could say, well, somebody earning a million dollars could give away two thirds of their income and still have quite a lot of money to live on, right? Why just one third?
So what I'm trying to do here is to find amounts that I don't think anybody could say is a really serious sacrifice to their quality of life. And yet, when you add up, you know, what we would raise if people gave this, it's vastly larger than the amounts of money that are given to help people in extreme poverty at present.
And I think it's enough to say if it was used wisely, we would have a good chance of, I wouldn't say eliminating, but reducing extreme poverty to small pockets rather than to the 750 million or so people who the World Bank says are in extreme poverty today.
And one of the interesting things that your organisation does, it actually looks for those charities and organisations that are using everyone's dollars in the most effective way. Because I think often people I've spoken to in Australia, they maybe don't donate.
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Chapter 6: How much should we give to charity based on our income?
Well, I think the answer to that is by donating to societies where the impact has been verified as being very good value for the dollars you're giving. And there's two things to think about there. You just mentioned the percentage that actually goes to the project rather to administration or further fundraising. And of course, in some cases, if 50% is going for administration,
you know, that's probably not going to be very good value. But on the other hand, as anybody who's run a business knows, you need to have some administration to make the business run efficiently itself.
And if all that people think about is how low is the proportion that goes on administration and fundraising, then they're going to put pressure on organisations to cut their staff to the point where even if they can say 90% of what we raise goes to the low-income country,
They can't say that it's actually doing what we want it to because they don't have the staff to supervise and check up that it is doing what we want it to. So we need to balance that. We need to balance the amount that is going to administration to make sure that organizations can still be efficient in what they're doing. And we need to know that the impact of their projects is really good.
And some projects you could spend as much as you like on it, but they wouldn't really achieve very much. It's been demonstrated that a variety of projects have failed. Projects need to be tested in the field. And ideally, they need to be tested against kind of the equivalent of a placebo in drug testing.
So in other words, say for the distribution of bed nets against malaria that I mentioned, you need to have some baselines with how many children died in villages when there was no bed nets distributed. And how many children died in villages where bed nets were distributed? And then you can get a really good picture that, yes, this is an impactful program that saves lives.
Or, you know, how many people had their sight restored through cataract surgery through this program rather than other places where there was no non-government organization that was providing cataract surgery. So those are the things that we're looking for. And the life you can save is looking for that kind of evidence. And it's drawing on
Some other organisations, because we can't do all that research ourselves, it's drawing on, I mentioned already, GiveWell, another organisation that does this, and Impact Matters is another organisation. So we're pulling together research that is done by different organisations and making it easily accessible to you on our website, thelifeyoucansave.org.
Peter, one of the things that I struggle with is I want to give... And I want to do it as effectively as I can. And we'll get to this in just a minute. But one of the things that I think about in the back of my mind, just for full disclosure, I'm an investor by trade. I'm an analyst and I invest money for a living.
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Chapter 7: Are there too many charities, and does this create inefficiencies?
And one of the things that I struggle with is making the decision of, you know, okay, I've got $1 now. I could donate that right now. Or if I
saved and invested well maybe in three to five years i can give a lot more and more often um so i guess the question is for people that are listening to this as much as myself is should we wait until we've sorted out our finances you know got on top of debts and all that sort of stuff or should we just start now and i and give a little bit i feel like i might know your answer but yes um
So I do think that starting now and giving something is a good thing to do because it's a learning process. And it's also, if you like, a habit-forming process. And some habits are good to form early. So I think it puts you in touch with organizations and you learn about them. And you may not be giving very much, but it'll help to form your choices later on when you have more to give.
Now, in terms of the question, well, is it better to reinvest and give later? That really depends on your rate of return as compared to the rate of return of what you might call an investment in reducing poverty. Because, of course, there is a rate of return of that.
If you give money to a family now that helps to lift them out of poverty, then they may be better able to educate their children and their children may then have better jobs and better positions and may help the economy of the country where they're living in. So, to that extent, it's better to give now rather than later.
On the other hand, your return on your investment means it's better to give later. So, you know, I'm actually very glad that Warren Buffett didn't give away most of the first million dollars he earned because… That was going to be my follow-up question. Right, okay. I anticipated you.
Yeah, because, you know, he invested that and reinvested it and now he's given away, I think, something like $30 billion and he's given it effectively through the Gates Foundation as well. So, if you…
fancy that you're as good as warren buffett you can your rate of return is probably better than the rate of return on investing in poverty reduction but um you know most of us ordinary mugs probably aren't quite up to that level i wouldn't hold myself in such a state
Yeah. And I think that's quite interesting, the idea of building that habit early, because if we just think that we're going to start donating when we've sorted out our life, we've raised our kids, everything like that, we might be 50 or 60. And I mean, the probability that you're going to start doing it then when you haven't done it for the decades prior is probably quite low.
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Chapter 8: How can our careers contribute to effective altruism?
Well, many of them did grow up in a home that gave and it just comes much more naturally to them than those who don't.
Yeah, I think my first experience with sort of donating and giving to others was through a sponsor child my parents had as we grew up and sort of you grew up and you saw that child grow up alongside of you. And that was probably my first exposure to donating and helping others.
Yeah, I think that's quite often the case. Those organisations have been very popular with families for that kind of reason.
Yeah. So one of the other questions I wanted to ask is, because this is probably, this is something that I've thought about in Australia. Do you think there are too many charities globally? And does this lead to an inefficient use of funds?
Because I know there's hundreds of thousands of registered charities in Australia and every second person seems to be setting something up for their own cause. Do you think That's an inefficient use of funds or should we focus on consolidating into a few major charities?
Well, it is an inefficient use of funds in the sense that they all need their separate administrative structure. And also, it's sometimes a problem for the governments of low-income countries because they may be facing a lot of applications to do projects in those countries and they're spending time doing that. when really a smaller number of larger projects would do just as well.
On the other hand, the fact that people can start their own organization has led, I think, to some very successful, lean and efficient organizations. And I've already mentioned the Against Malaria Foundation, which is just one of those organizations. It was started by somebody who saw a need for something that wasn't being done at the time elsewhere. And
ran it out of his home office and just had a couple of other people working and then made contacts with people in the countries where malaria is prevalent and is killing people. And so I built that up. So, you know, somebody could have said, well, you know, why did he do that? Oxfam was already in existence. Why didn't he just go and work for Oxfam?
But as anybody in the business field would know, sometimes there's a need for a new startup that does something that the older firms haven't seen and they can be faster and respond more quickly and have new ideas. So I'm not in favor of in any way sort of forcibly restricting the entry of new organizations.
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